Can you adequately identify & express your feelings as an entrepreneur?

After a little hiatus (aka back-to-back flu!), I’m here again with Entrepreneurs who Flourish…

…& this week, I wanted to share a PosPsych tool that I came across recently, that can help build your awareness of emotions AND help to communicate them more effectively.

It’s called The Feelings Wheel.

As entrepreneurs, it’s a blinkin’ emotional rollercoaster isn’t it?! Up, down, high, low, success, fail, elation, exhaustion… the list goes on!

“emotion is defined as an episode of interrelated, synchronised changes in the state of all or most of the five organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism” (Emotion Researcher, 2015).

But sometimes we lump our emotions into big categories like “sad”, rather than look at the nuances of what we’re actually feeling, eg “deflated”. In doing this, we’re not properly identifying what we’re feeling & therefore aren’t giving ourselves (or those around us) the insight to create a plan to resolve them.

And chances are, your partner/family/friends get the brunt of the emotions you feel as an entrepreneur right? *good & bad* – so wouldn’t it be nice to be able communicate them better? (One of the pillars in the PERMAH model of PosPsych (Seligman, 2012) is ‘Relationships’ & so it’s integral we work on these if we want to be successful in biz).

Communication of emotions comes down to 2 things:

1. Self-awareness
2. Language

And there’s a great PosPsych exercise, that’s super simple & can help you with both of these points… Feelings Journalling. And it used the Feelings Wheel.

Here’s what to do:

1. Download your Feelings Wheel here – it’s quite simple to use, the inner circle identifies the broader emotion/feeling & as you work outwards from it, you get the more nuanced/specific emotions/feelings.
2. Describe And Journal Your Feelings for 7 days – & at the end of the week analyse the most common feelings you experience. The best way to do this is either in your notes on your phone. Record the experience and emotion.
3. Think about the positive emotions you experienced, when & why – & then brainstorm some ideas of how to incorporate those more into your life
4. Think about the negative emotions you experienced, when & why – & then think about how you could reduce the frequency of these emotions in your life